Between 1964 and 1968, Dick Nixon and Dick Helms fulfilled their lifelong ambitions. Helms was energized by a new love as Nixon was sustained by the fierce loyalty of Rose Mary Woods. Cuba faded as an issue, and Vietnam exploded. As Nixon slashed away at LBJ’s war policy, Helms implemented it with growing reservations. Nixon remade himself as the epitome of Republican unity. Helms became America’s top spy.
Nixon’s energy was agile. He bowed out of the 1964 race just as it became apparent that conservative voters favored Barry Goldwater as the Republican nominee. Lyndon Johnson’s landslide victory in November propelled Nixon’s ambitions. The party lost badly at every level, and the most committed Republicans—local party chairmen, aspiring candidates, and conservative intellectuals—flocked to Nixon as a man with a plan to rebuild. The volume of mail, phone calls, comments, and speaking requests coming into Nixon’s office surged. “Rose was working 12 and 14 hours a day. Pat came to pitch in,” Nixon recalled. “By the end of the year, it was clear I would have to begin building a personal staff not just for the 1966 campaign, but with an eye to be ready for 1968.”1
Rose Woods became the channel through which the world communicated with Nixon. She was, in the words of journalist Garry Wills, the “heroine of a thousand crises that flare up and are extinguished around a public man, who cannot be distracted by them.” She was also “villainess to many disgruntled veterans of these crises.” She was protective, devoted, and inclined to hold a grudge.2
Nixon was growing fervent about Southeast Asia.
“It is dangerous and foolhardy to try and gloss over the truth as to what the war in Vietnam really involves,” he declared in a speech to the Sales Executive Club in New York in January 1965. He was talking to a banquet hall of advertising men about a country that few in the room, save himself, had ever visited. “I urge that we take the war to North Vietnam,” he railed, “by naval and air bombing of the communist supply routes in South Vietnam and by destroying the Viet Cong staging areas in North Vietnam and Laos.”3
The soldiers of Madison Avenue cheered Nixon’s bombast and went back to their accounts. Nixon went right on agitating for escalation, domination, and victory. His vehemence about Vietnam replaced his passion for Cuba. President Johnson pursued the very course that Nixon recommended (and Kennedy had resisted), He committed two hundred thousand men to South Vietnam, including combat troops for the first time. The United States launched a massive bombing campaign against North Vietnam, with B-52s disgorging ten-thousand-pound bombs from the sky, annihilating military bases, rail depots, airfields, and many of the people in them, whether civilians or armed combatants.
The realities of the war soon reached America. In August 1965, U.S. Marines torched a peasant village near Da Nang as CBS correspondent Morley Safer and millions of viewers looked on in horror. That month, one hundred seventy-nine Americans were killed in Vietnam. Seventy-six died in aircraft or helicopter crashes. Twenty-eight were officers. Three were named Johnson. Their average age was twenty-three years old. U.S. generals expected to break the enemy’s will in a year.4
Nixon, while a good study, overestimated his allies and underestimated the enemy. The Vietnamese communists fighting the government in Saigon drew on the nationalist tradition that resisted French colonialism, Japanese occupation during World War II, and Chinese incursions from time immemorial. Ho Chi Minh, who studied Marxism in Paris and spent time in the United States, had updated national feeling with a Marxist analysis of imperialism to forge an independence movement that took power in the northern part of the country. The South Vietnamese government, rooted in the more superficial soil of Saigonese pride and French influence, had no such compelling cause. Nixon assumed that America’s firepower and ideology would inevitably prove superior, a colonialist mentality updated as a defense of the Free World.
But it was China that began to occupy pride of place in Nixon’s geopolitical imagination. Under communist rule, the world’s largest country shunned foreign trade and contacts while pursuing a vast project of collective development under Mao Zedong. Nixon envisioned the United States prevailing in Vietnam and making peace with China. “We simply cannot afford to leave China forever outside the family of nations, there to nurture its fantasies, cherish its hates and threaten its neighbors,” he wrote in Foreign Affairs, house organ of the American policymaking class, in October 1967.5 The ambitions of this dogged man from Whittier—and the violence of his statecraft—almost defied reason. Nixon was “defined by the quality of absolute tirelessness wrapped around total determination,” said columnist William White.6 Waging war in Vietnam had become essential to the country’s future—and his.
In 1965, Helms’s ambitions were deferred once again, though not fatally. Johnson had become disenchanted with John McCone, who wanted to brief the president every day. Johnson, Helms said, “finally got bored, closed the door, and that was the end. He just didn’t want to do it anymore. You couldn’t make him do it anymore.” For the ambitious Helms, the lesson was obvious: “You either adjust your production to the man you have in office or you’re going to miss the train.”7
The proud McCone, who could not stand being ignored, announced his resignation. President Johnson, like Kennedy before him, wanted an outsider to run the Agency. He appointed navy admiral William Raborn as the next director, but he made a point of asking Helms to stay on, attend NSC meetings, and cultivate the Agency’s contacts on Capitol Hill. “Now you get yourself known around town,” LBJ advised.8 The message was implicit: Stick around. Helms called 1965 his “training period.”9
Helms didn’t share his good news with many people, but he did tell his friend Howard Hunt. The two men lunched between three and six times a year in Hunt’s estimation. In between, they talked on the phone.10 Helms confided to Hunt that he had just returned from LBJ’s ranch in Texas, where he spent a wild weekend speeding around in a jeep with the president. Johnson had told him he was keeping him on as deputy director, with the implication that if he maintained good relations with key senators, he would become director someday. “So far as I know,” Hunt said, “I was the first person he told about such an important event in his life.”11
Helms attended to the image of the Agency by cultivating sympathetic journalists. He lunched with Hugh Sidey of Time magazine and Cyrus Sulzberger, a New York Times columnist. He befriended Katharine Graham, who had taken over as publisher of the Washington Post after the suicide of her husband Phil in 1963. He befriended Richard Russell of Georgia, the ancient segregationist chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, and bantered with Eugene McCarthy, a witty liberal maverick from Minnesota.
Helms didn’t countenance criticism of his Agency. In the spring of 1964 he sought to block Random House from publishing a book by journalists David Wise and Thomas Ross, which depicted the Agency as “The Invisible Government” that made its own policies and bungled major operations. The book became a bestseller, which bothered Hunt even more than it bothered Helms. Hunt drafted a negative review for his old friend Bill Buckley, now publisher of the National Review and a syndicated columnist. Buckley trimmed Hunt’s prose and published it under his own byline in seventy-five newspapers around the country.12
Amid the new questioning of the Agency, Helms conceived a new assignment for his restless friend Hunt. In early 1965, he transferred him from the Domestic Contacts Division to a unit called the Operations Group, where he could focus on what he did best: write. His mission: to become the Ian Fleming of the American clandestine service. Fleming’s best-selling James Bond novels, and the movies based on them—Dr. No, From Russia with Love, and Goldfinger—had glamourized the British secret service in the eyes of the world. Why not do the same for the CIA?
Victor Weybright, editor of the chief of the New American Library, a paperback publishing house, had approached Hunt with the idea of developing an American counterpart to the James Bond series. “As you may imagine this is plenty delicate,” Hunt wrote to Buckley, “since no matter how popular the series might become, I need certain guarantees that are, up to now, unique in publishing,” presumably a reference to keeping his true identity secret.13 Hunt submitted the idea to Helms, “who agreed this was a magnificent opportunity to boost the image of the CIA. Of course,” Hunt told Buckley “the editor had no idea that he was working with a current CIA officer who had an ulterior motive to write the books.”14
Hunt was a plausible candidate for the job, at least to Helms. For much of his career, Hunt devoted himself to writing novels, possibly more than he devoted himself to spying. “He wrote between four and eight hours a day during the week and all day every day on the weekend,” said daughter Lisa.15 By the summer of 1965 he had finished On Hazardous Duty, a thriller introducing Peter Ward, a natty, pipe-smoking, world-weary CIA officer, and magnet for women, doing battle with international communism. Writing under the pseudonym “David St. John,” Hunt intended Peter Ward to become the American 007.
Hunt knew the world of which he wrote. On Hazardous Duty opened with a burglary, a black-bag job, with a team of crack operatives reporting to Peter Ward in a nearby command post, much as Hunt would direct the Watergate burglars seven years in the future. In Hunt’s tale, however, the burglars managed not to get caught.16
Hunt’s plots unfolded in exotic locales lovingly described. A Tokyo brothel. A Hong Kong music studio. A Phnom Penh tea house. In the Peter Ward books that followed, a fetching woman inevitably appeared at some point, seductive and treacherous, or loving and generous. The communists could be counted on to kill the liberals who fell for their propaganda. And all the while Peter Ward took orders from an imposing deputy director back at CIA headquarters named Avery Thorne. Save the color of his hair, Thorne resembled no one so much as Hunt’s great good friend Dick Helms.
“The deputy director was a tall, spare man, dressed conservatively with fine entirely white hair, and an ageless face that had a touch of ascetism,” Hunt wrote. “A highly controlled man, not given to emotional extremes, Thorne’s eyes had narrowed as he gazed towards the sunlit glass wall, and [Peter Ward] remembered that he had earned his spurs in Berlin against the Russians and stayed on to begin the endless secret fight.”
Avery Thorne was a superior man. “Thorne resembled a broker or financier rather than spymaster. His manners were somewhat elegant, and he could don the air of affability for the Hill, but professionally, he was as single minded as a monk on hazardous duty.”17
Helms was flattered. No literary snob, he liked Fleming’s From Russia with Love, and he rather liked On Hazardous Duty. Perhaps Helms imagined the suave Avery Thorne on the big screen, an American version of “M,” as James Bond’s MI6 boss was known in the 007 movies. Helms’s colleague, Walter Pforzheimer, was less impressed. Pforzheimer was a career analyst and a bibliophile with his own private library of espionage books filling an entire apartment in the new Watergate complex in Foggy Bottom. Curious about the identity of the author “David St. John,” he obtained the copyright application for On Hazardous Duty, which included Hunt’s home address. Not for the first time, Hunt’s tradecraft was sloppy.
Pforzheimer reported his finding to Tom Karamessines. “If the agency is involved in this thing,” Pforzheimer huffed, “why not see that Hunt leaves his address off the copyright application in the future?” Five minutes after he left Karamessines’s office, Pforzheimer got a scorching call from Helms.
“For Christ’s sake, Walter,” Helms barked, “this is the first book to come along and say something good about the Agency. Why not leave the goddamn thing alone?”18
Only Helms and Karamessines had known the identity of Peter Ward’s creator, which is to say Pforzheimer had a point. Hunt’s name might become public. Helms put out the word that Hunt was retiring, while switching him to a one-year contract working in Spain.19 Few in the Langley headquarters believed the retirement story. In fact, Hunt was going on a taxpayer-funded vacation to concoct the further adventures of Peter Ward.20 “I wanted to get out of Washington,” Hunt said, “I thought it was a great idea to get to Spain.”21
In July 1965, Howard and Dorothy Hunt, with their four children, Lisa, St. John, Kevan, and David, boarded the S.S. Covadonga, a freighter and passenger ship that operated between New York and Spain.22 Adventure was calling, and the Hunts were willing. Howard had few operational duties, only an opportunity to write books glorifying the clandestine service he loved. The Hunts settled in a suburb of Madrid, where Howard retreated into the world of Peter Ward, poking away at his typewriter, or leaving for unexplained trips. “Even when he was around, he wasn’t around much,” recalled son St. John.23 All of his communications with the Agency were handled by Tom Karamessines, Hunt told Senate investigators. “This was a project that had been laid on by Dick Helms.”24
Hunt’s next Peter Ward adventure, Festival for Spies, opened with a scene perhaps too obviously written for the movies, with nautical details supplied by yachtsman Bill Buckley.25 Peter Ward is captaining a sailboat in the Newport-to-Bermuda yacht race when a helicopter appears overhead and drops a message from—who else?—Avery Thorne. He orders Peter to quit the race and leave for a secret mission to Cambodia, where Ward falls for the sex-starved wife of a cabinet minister, thwarts her blackmail scheme, and fortifies a government struggling to resist communism.
Hunt’s jaunty style concealed real pain. He had a duodenal ulcer that hemorrhaged and fits of depression that recurred. When he learned that Frank Wisner, the former deputy director who hired him in 1950, had shot himself to death at his country home on Maryland’s Eastern Shore, he wondered “how much longer I could take the work myself if this Gibraltar of a figure had succumbed to the pressure?”26 In January 1966, Hunt’s mother died in upstate New York. He returned to Albany for her funeral and then went on to Washington to talk to Helms. Hunt’s youngest son David was mysteriously ill, and he wanted advice. “[Helms] agreed that the welfare of my son was paramount,” Hunt said, “and left in my hands the decision whether to remain in Spain or return to the United States undercover.”27 Hunt decided to stay in Spain.28
Hunt finished three more Peter Ward books in the course of the year, Festival for Spies, The Venus Probe, and The Towers of Silence. None of the manuscripts had been submitted for review as required by Agency regulations;29 all were published by New American Library in paperback.30 To lend his hero the savoir faire of Bond, Hunt made Peter Ward a master of menus and wardrobe, a gourmand with a gun. In Hong Kong’s Parisian Grill (“P.G.” to those in the know), Ward “began with Malossol caviar on Melba rounds, a brace of dry martinis, soupe a l’oignon, tiny French lambchops with a crisp green salad, and for dessert a frozen mousse with crushed fruit and liqueur known as plombieres.”31 Espionage, it seems, was delicious.
All the while the booze flowed. Peter Ward often took refuge in a bottle of Canadian Club, nothing unusual in hard-boiled fiction but not necessarily endearing. After reading through Hunt’s collected oeuvre, Gore Vidal picked up on the increasingly “obsessive need for the juice to counteract the melancholy of middle age. The hangovers, as described, get a lot worse, too.”32
In the spring of 1966, Dick Helms planted himself by the piano at a reception in the Lebanese Embassy in Washington. He noticed a brown-haired woman about his age enter the salon, and she noticed him. He winked. She wasn’t expecting a flirt. “By chance, we sat next to each other at dinner,” recalled Cynthia McKelvie. “We hit it off and had an immensely good time talking. His wife, Julia, and I were members of a group of women called, ‘the Minnows,’ who swam together.”33
McKelvie, an English expatriate and mother of four, was ending a loveless twenty-five-year marriage. Helms had grown apart from Julia, “and it was probably my fault,” he confided in his memoir.34 He and McKelvie had more than a few things in common. One was the shared experience of England during the war. While he worked for the OSS in London, she had served in the Wrens, the female contingent of the British armed forces. Helms liked to banter and gossip, and so did she. She was a docent at the Smithsonian, curious, artistic, and vivacious. When they were alone, he liked to listen to classical music and play the conductor, waving his arms to bring in the violins, pointing a finger to cue the brass section. Cynthia bought him a baton.35
Helms moved out of his house and moved into guest quarters at the Chevy Chase Country Club, where he was a member. Hunt was among the few who knew he was getting divorced. At the office, colleagues saw the same man: a crisp and efficient boss, loyal to competent underlings, stringent about standards, and tight with the budgetary dollar.
Helms became known for his managerial aphorisms. Dave Phillips, now stationed in the Dominican Republic, recalled the deputy director’s routine when sending a station chief out to some foreign capital. After a few minutes of laconic conversation, “Helms would deliver one of his famous one-liners,” Phillips wrote. “One might be, ‘Ring the gong for me,’ meaning he wanted to know in advance of a coup or other rapid change of government. Or it might be, ‘Teach those people how to run an intelligence service.’ Or ‘See what you can do to bring the Ambassador around,’ meaning he wanted good relations restored where a Station Chief and an Ambassador had been feuding.” And sometimes his advice was nothing more profound than “Get along with the FBI.”36
Helms paid attention to the bureaucratic breezes. Frances FitzGerald, daughter of Desmond FitzGerald, now Far East division chief, overheard Helms talking to her father at their country house in Virginia. “Helms was always checking with the higher ups,… saying, you know, ‘stay within these lines,’” she recalled in an interview. “… He was always looking up as opposed to down.”37
He devoted ever more time to Vietnam. LBJ’s escalating war demanded the Agency’s support, both in analyzing the strength of the enemy and conducting secret operations in country. Johnson and his generals assumed that killing more people would force the North Vietnamese to negotiate. The Agency’s operational officers thought the key was killing the right people—the cadre of the Viet Cong. The pessimistic estimates from the Directorate of Intelligence found little evidence that either strategy was winning the war. “At no time was the institutional dichotomy between the operational and the analytical components more stark,” Helms wrote.38
In March 1966, 563 Americans died in Vietnam. Only thirty-six had been drafted. Four were named Johnson. Their average age was twenty-four years old.39 Many thousands more Vietnamese were killed for which there was no statistical accounting. The brutality of the war was obvious. The futility was unexpected.
On the morning of March 7, 1966, Helms dictated a memo to Secretary of State Dean Rusk. He wanted to correct news reports about the arrest of two men in Havana, Rolando Cubela and Ramon Guin Diaz, for allegedly plotting with CIA agents. “The Agency was not involved with either of these two men in a plot to assassinate Fidel Castro,” Helms wrote, “… nor did it ever encourage either of these two persons to attempt such an act.”40
The memo was, in Helms’s ineffable style, partially true and wholly misleading. It was true that case officer Nestor Sanchez did not incite Cubela to kill Castro in any of their five clandestine meetings in Brazil and France in late 1963. But Helms knew Cubela had been recruited precisely because he had a record of armed action. The purpose of Helms’s memo, however, was not veracity but plausible deniability. The secretary of state could now plausibly deny to the world (and himself and his wife and his friends) that the U.S. government was not involved in political murder. After all, his esteemed intelligence chief had told him so.
One of the last living participants in the AMLASH operation scoffed at Helms’s claim. Carl Jenkins, a ninety-four-year-old retired CIA trainer, recalled many details of the operation in an interview for this book. Jenkins trained counterinsurgency teams in Cold War battlegrounds from Indonesia to Cuba to Laos. His role in the conspiracy only emerged with the declassification of AMLASH files in 2017. They told the story that Helms preferred to obfuscate. Asked if assassination was the goal of the AMLASH operation, Jenkins didn’t hesitate. “Of course,” he said.
In 1964 Jenkins was reporting to Henry Heckscher, a veteran officer whom Helms had assigned to handle Bob Kennedy’s Cuba projects under a program called AMWORLD. After the still-grieving RFK quit as attorney general and LBJ scaled back Cuba operations in 1964, Helms used AMWORLD to support the Cubans still fighting Castro. Jenkins said he became “great friends” with Nestor Sanchez, Helms’s aide who had stayed in touch with Cubela after Kennedy’s assassination. In the cable traffic, Jenkins was known by a string of acronyms that denoted his position: WH/SA/SO/HH. That meant Jenkins worked in the Agency’s Western Hemisphere (WH) division. He was involved in Special Affairs (SA), meaning Cuba. He was responsible for Special Operations (SO), secret missions. And he acted on behalf of Henry Heckscher (HH). In other words, it was Jenkins’s job to implement orders handed down by headquarters through four layers of bureaucracy.
Jenkins wrote five memos to Heckscher about the AMLASH project in the fall of 1964, in which he recounted meetings with Cubans who supported Cubela’s plans to eliminate Castro. One of the plotters was Manolo Artime, the chameleonic doctor known inside the CIA by the cryptonym AMBIDDY-1 who was now godfather to Hunt’s infant son David. Artime had replaced Nestor Sanchez as the Agency’s contact with Cubela. When Artime and Cubela met in Madrid in December 1964, Cubela reiterated his demand for a weapon, specifically a Belgian-made FAL rifle.
“The FAL was the NATO rifle,” Jenkins explained. “It was easy to get ammunition for it. That was something I could do.” Thanks to Jenkins’s arrangements, Artime delivered the weapon to Cubela. Jenkins’s account extinguishes Helms’s claim that AMLASH was not an assassination conspiracy. Cubela was arrested fourteen months later.
“Just another busted operation,” Jenkins shrugged. As for Helms, “he was an asshole as far as I’m concerned,” the old soldier growled. “My recollection is that he made a point to get just close enough to try to influence things—and just far away enough to not get his hands dirty and get caught.”41
The same day that Helms wrote his memo to Rusk, the chastened Rolando Cubela took the stand in La Causa 108 (Court Case 108), heard in a Havana courtroom. His bushy beard and revolutionary bravado were gone, replaced by a playboy’s pencil-thin mustache and the contrition of a convict. He wanted to explain his guilt, not excuse it.
“I was carrying around a series of preoccupations and contradictions, the product of long struggle after the triumph of the Revolution,” he said, perhaps alluding to his nightmares about the smiling Colonel Blanco Rico. “They made me fall into a disorderly life, a life of parties, cabarets, a completely insane life. I was decomposing and deteriorating.”42
Some press accounts assumed Cubela’s contrition was coerced. Time magazine said he was drugged.43 “The clear, precise, careful, educated statements he made throughout the trial do not bear this comment out to any degree,” wrote the CIA analyst who covered the trial via translations from the Agency’s Foreign Broadcast Information Service. Cubela, in fact, was a cagey witness who knew how to present the image he wanted. “He has some skill in adjusting his style to the people he is talking to. While he can be rather eloquent, he is not likely to divulge anything which should be kept secret.”44
On the stand, Cubela confessed his playboy lifestyle got the better of him. “I was losing the demanding principles of the revolution … relaxing, accommodating myself to a life that was completely disorganized and that produced in me a pretty big emotional imbalance.” He admitted plotting “against the integrity and the stability of the nation.” Indeed, he said he had planned the “physical elimination” of his former comrade Castro.45 He admitted what Helms denied.
Because no one knew the scope of the busted operation, much less Helms’s leading role in it, the deputy director was free to minimize the Agency’s relationship with Cubela. “These contacts,” he assured Secretary Rusk, “were restricted to obtaining intelligence.”46
After Cubela was sentenced to death by firing squad, Castro sent a letter to the court saying he did not favor capital punishment in La Causa 108. Against the treacherous nature of Cubela’s actions, Castro cited the noble impulses that prompted him to take up arms against Batista. Cubela had fought shoulder to shoulder with Che in Santa Clara and defended the revolution on campus. “Among revolutionary men,” Castro wrote, “nothing can replace the bond of the beginning.” The court reduced Cubela’s sentence to twenty-five years in La Cabana, a fort and prison overlooking Havana harbor, where Cubela served as a doctor for his fellow prisoners.
“He was a very attractive guy,” recalled Santiago Morales, a young man from Havana arrested in Castro’s post–Bay of Pigs crackdown. Morales met Cubela when his tonsils became infected. Cubela arranged for an operation, and they became close friends. “Everybody liked him,” Morales said in an interview. “He had no special privileges. We talked a lot but, as a rule never got into details of our reasons for being there.… He told me … about being interviewed by Raul Castro while he was in prison.” Cubela believed it was Raul who prevailed on Fidel to spare his life.
Cubela spoke only in passing about his execution of Colonel Blanco Rico in the Montmartre, Morales said. It was a painful subject. “It’s one thing to kill not knowing who you’re killing,” Morales said, “but when there’s a name and a family and a pleasant human being—and they say he [Colonel Rico] was a pleasant human being—it hurts. And it didn’t lead to a happy ending.”47
Three months after Cubela’s conviction, Helms achieved his dream. On June 18, 1966, he received a phone call from the White House. He was told that President Johnson was holding a press conference later that day to announce his appointment as director of Central Intelligence. Twenty-three years after joining the OSS, Helms assumed control of the global U.S. intelligence service. “He loves power,” said his soon to be ex-wife Julia, “and must have it.”48 At long last, he did.
The following month Richard Nixon embarked on yet another foreign trip seeking to meet world leaders, keep his name in the news, and open doors for his law firm. With Pat and Rose Woods, he traversed Europe and Asia. He claimed he wouldn’t attack the Democrats or President Johnson while overseas, and then proceeded to do just that. Along the way he called for increasing the number of U.S. troops in Vietnam from less than three hundred thousand to more than five hundred thousand.49
In the fall Nixon campaigned for both liberal and conservative Republicans across the country. His message on the war was simple: “Let’s get it over with and get the boys home,” he declared in Ohio. “Let’s end it without escalation of ground warfare or appeasement.” One reporter found Nixon tanned, relaxed, friendly, and articulate as he posed for pictures “with possible winners and born losers.”50 “Skillful tactician or fanatical opportunist?” another reporter wondered.
In November 1966, Nixon was a winner. In the mid-term elections, Republicans picked up forty-seven seats in the House, three in the Senate, and eight governorships.51 Polls showed Nixon was the party’s favorite candidate for 1968.
What makes you run, a reporter asked?
“Sometimes I wonder myself,” Nixon replied. “I started in this thing when I was thirty-two. Now, I’m not an extrovert. I like people but I don’t love the adulation of the crowd and all that stuff. But I’m one who believes that you pass this way only once. When great decisions are made, you want to be in on them.”52
The greatest decision was Vietnam. Six hundred forty-one Americans died in fighting that month. Five hundred sixty-one were white, seventy-three were African American, and seven were Asian or Native American. They hailed from forty-five states, Puerto Rico, and the District of Columbia.53 The Joint Chiefs’ predicted victory was less than two years away.